Prepping for College Students Part 1

I'm going to start a series titled "Prepping for College Students." It will be a guide for a prepper in college that is just getting started. I haven't read much about college students prepping but hopefully this will show some on the fence how easy and cheap it really is. Prepping when you're in college and still living at home is a lot different than prepping if you own your own home. It makes a big difference when deciding how to prep, and making the decision on what to buy. After lots of research and countless hours on the internet, I started making my prep item purchases and over the course of a couple months, built up what I think is a good insurance policy for things to come. Most college students are too involved in meaningless and useless activities to worry about prepping or even the economy for that matter. But there are some students out there that are wanting to prep, but don't see how they can do it, or how they can finance their preps. The good news is that buying a few preps is really cheap and by not eating out, or not buying a bunch of crap you already have, you could have the money to buy a good amount of preps by working a part time job.

I started prepping with little direction in where I wanted to go, and how much I wanted to get for myself. Ideally, I would like to have 5 years of food, water, thousands of rounds of ammo, multiple guns...you get the picture. The problem of being in college is that you A. don't have a lot of disposable income, and B. Don't have your own place to store these items. I decided that my best bet would be to secure a 3 month supply of food and water for myself. All the food would be fairly easy to prepare, needing only heat or water to be ready to eat. It would need to be easily storable, with long shelf lives. Rice, beans, canned goods, and other dried foods filled my lists of what I wanted to buy. As I was finding out, these foods that are storable and long lasting are really the cheapest foods you can buy. Junk food is the most expensive, so when making out a list of food preps, bulk and canned foods are the cheapest and best to get.

Three months of food honestly won't take up that much space. I'm sure everyone has a closet in their room back at home that is full of junk. First you must clear the space to put your food stores. About 6 months ago I went through all my junk and took it all to the salvation army. Anything of value I sold on ebay for extra cash. This is the first step because you have to have a place to store your supplies. Next if you don't have the money or a job, then get a part time job. I work part time and before I woke up to what's going on I wasted most of my money on clothes and gadgets. Since then I have stopped spending a dime on eating out, any additional clothes, shoes, or gadgets. This might not sound like much but over the course of a couple months this will really add up. You will be surprised how much prep items you can buy just by saving the money you would spend at Wendy's, Burger King or American Eagle.

So you've got your space cleared out, and your money saved up. How much money would you need? I will get into more detail in upcoming parts of this series, but for 3 months of food alone I only spent $200. This includes some extra things that will add additional taste and variety into the diet if I had to solely rely on my food storage. My 3 month supply is very complete, and with rationing and saving, I could easily stretch it to 4 months or even more. In a survival situation, you can't rely on any outside forces to support you or help you. You're going to need warmth in the winter/nighttime, a way to cook/heat the food, and a source of light in the dark. The basic human needs are food, water and shelter. I'm going to cover the basics through this series. I plan on bugging in at my parents house because it's where my preps are and I have nowhere else to go. There are many people in this situation and it's possible for us to prepare also. You can't stay in your dorm so getting home and having the means to survive is important.

Prepping for College Students Part 2
Prepping for College Students Part 3
Prepping for College Students Part 4